The state arises ‘contractually’ from individuals who seek order and security. To serve its purpose, the state must be autocratic and awesome. Any system of political rule, however tyrannical, is preferable to no rule at all. 

The state arises organically and should be aristocratic, driven by a hereditary elite, reared to rule in the interests of all. Burke also argued for a state that was based on multiple small communities, his ‘little platoons’. Only in such accessible and intimate communities could individuals begin to grow in their affection and loyalty to the national state.

Huge, distant and centralised structures could never undertake the benevolent, paternalist functions Burke envisaged for the state.

The state should be guided by tradition and practical concerns.

Pragmatism, not dogmatism, should be its watchword.

The minarchist or 'Night Watchman'  state should merely outsource, renew and reallocate contracts to private companies providing public services. the growth of government was the gravest contemporary threat to individual freedom. More specifically, Nozick thought the growth of welfare states in western Europe fostered a dependency culture.

Nozick saw the state as very much the procurer and not provider of public services.

Its function was to secure the best deal for taxpayers when it came to delivering

public services. Large state institutions were unwieldy and inefficient and needed

to be broken up and outsourced to private contractors

The state should confine itself to law, order and national security. Any attempt to promote ‘positive liberty’, via further state intervention, should be resisted. She wrote: ‘The small state is the strong state.’

For Rand, law, order and national security should be the primary concerns of the state.

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The state

Cynical: Humans are needy and vulnerable People will compete violently to get the basic necessities of life and other material gains, will challenge others and fight out of fear to ensure their personal safety, and will seek reputation, both for its own sake and so that others will be too afraid to challenge them.

Human nature had to be tamed and controlled by making a contract with a higher power, which in turn would provide stability and guarantee freedoms..

Sceptical: the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ is marked by a gap between aspiration and achievement. We may conceive of perfection but we are unable to achieve it.

 Burke stressed mankind’s fallibility and its tendency to fail more than succeed. He therefore denounced the idealistic society that the French Revolution represented, claiming it was based on a utopian — and thus unrealistic view of human nature.

Most men and women, are ‘fallible but not terrible’ and ‘imperfect but not immoral’. Though incapable of the ‘perfect’ societies linked to other ideologies, humanity was still able to secure ‘both pleasure and improvement through the humdrum business of everyday life’.

Conservatives, ‘prefer the familiar to the unknown, the actual to the possible, the convenient to the perfect…present laughter to utopian bliss’.

Oakeshott argued for a more qualified and slightly more optimistic take on human nature, seeing individuals more as ‘imperfect but not immoral’. 

Egotistical: individuals are driven by a quest for ‘self-ownership’, allowing them to realise their full potential.

individuals have self-ownership — that they are the sole authors of their talents and abilities and should be left alone to realise

them, without the intervention of government.

Nozick,  believed that human nature was underpinned by what he termed ‘self-ownership’, namely the absolute rights that all individuals have over their own rights, and that therefore no one else has the right to interfere without explicit permission. This approach could be summarised as ‘I am the rightful owner of myself’.

Objectivist’: we are — and ought to be — guided by rational self-interest and the pursuit of self- fulfilment.

Human Nature